Cowboys and Indians: Settlers and Native Americans in the West

For decades the Texas plains ran with the blood of natives and settlers, as pioneers carved out ranch land from ancient indian hunting grounds and the U.S. Army turned the tide of battle.Led by the remarkable waarrior, Little Buffalo, the Comanche and Kiowa are united in a campaign to wipe out the settlers forever.

Abandoned in childhood in pre-Civil War Texas, Tom Patterson grows up tough, wily and, surprisingly good-natured. These traits serve him well as a conscript cavalryman in the Confederate Army. His courage in combat and his resourcefulness in dangerous situations earn the attention, admiration, and friendship of his sergeant, Ben Haley. Slightly older and more levelheaded, Ben is a big brother mentor to the impetuous Tom during the war, and afterwards, they continue as friends and partners. Seeking new lives in the West, the two young men sign on with the Union Pacific. Serving as mounted guards, their duty is to protect construction workers on the transcontinental railroad from marauding Indians. With the battles of the war behind them, new and exciting adventures await as Tom and Ben face the many perils and the violence of the expanding frontier.

Army scout, buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and impresario of the world-renowned "Wild West Show," William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody lived the real American West and also helped create the "West of the imagination." Born in 1846, he took part in the great westward migration, hunted the buffalo, and made friends among the Plains Indians, who gave him the name Pahaska (long hair). But as the frontier closed and his role in "winning the West" passed into legend, Buffalo Bill found himself becoming the symbol of the destruction of the buffalo and the American Indian. Deeply dismayed, he spent the rest of his life working to save the remaining buffalo and to preserve Plains Indian culture through his Wild West shows. This biography of William Cody focuses on his lifelong relationship with Plains Indians, a vital part of his life story that, surprisingly, has been seldom told. Bobby Bridger draws on many historical accounts and Cody's own memoirs to show how deeply intertwined Cody's life was with the Plains Indians. In particular, he demonstrates that the Lakota and Cheyenne were active cocreators of the Wild West shows, which helped them preserve the spiritual essence of their culture in the reservation era while also imparting something of it to white society in America and Europe. This dual story of Buffalo Bill and the Plains Indians clearly reveals how one West was lost, and another born, within the lifetime of one remarkable man

Two Texas Rangers fight Indians and bandits while trying to sort affairs with their women. One is Gus McCrae, a hard-drinking womanizer jilted by his love, the other is sober Woodrow Call, father of a boy by a prostitute.

On deserting from a Royal Navy ship, sailor Barnaby Skye becomes a fur trapper in America. He marries an Indian woman, but she leaves him to become the second wife of an Indian chief. When another tribe abducts her, Skye goes to her rescue.

Conventional history records Geronimo, Cochise, and Victorio as the most important Apache military leaders, but the Apaches themselves include another hero: Lozen, valiant warrior, revered shaman, and beautiful woman.

He was etched by the desert's howling winds, a big, broad-shouldered man who knew the ways of the Apache and the ways of staying alive. She was a woman alone raising a young son on a remote Arizona ranch. And between Hondo Lane and Angie Lowe was the warrior Vittoro, whose people were preparing to rise against the white men. Now the pioneer woman, the gunman, and the Apache warrior are caught in a drama of love, war, and honor.

Jonah Wilde has always had an untamed spirit, and he will stop at nothing to achieve his dream of building a farming empire in the wild prairies of Indiana. But in 1810, the Shawnee Indians still call these prairies home, and a disastrous and violent encounter with the Shawnee changes everything for the Wilde family.
Jonah's young wife, Sadie, and his three-year-old son, Paul, are left to fend for themselves at Tippecanoe. Her dreams in tatters, Sadie doesn't know whether she'll have the strength to go on. Sadie and Paul's fate lies in the hands of the Powatomi leader, Windigo, and his Shawnee counterpart, the notorious Tecumseh. Will their lives be spared? And if they live, will they ever return to the life Sadie dreamt of with Jonah?

After surviving the massacre of his pioneer family, ten-year-old Jack is adopted by an Indian chief who nicknames him Little Big Man. As a Cheyenne, he feasts on dog, loves four wives, and sees his people butchered by horse soldiers commanded by General George Armstrong Custer. Later, living as a white man once more, he hunts the buffalo to near-extinction, tangles with Wyatt Earp, cheats Wild Bill Hickok, and fights in the Battle of Little Bighorn alongside Custer himself--a man he'd sworn to kill.

After a year of retirement at the end of the Civil War, George Armstrong Custer is summoned by General Sheridan and appointed to the cavalry to quell the Indians of the Southern plains territory. Success in this area leads Sheridan to have Custer subdue the Sioux and Cheyenne of the Northern plains. Custer carries on an extra-marital affair with a young Indian girl. This novel is a prelude to the Battle of Little Big Horn.

When Crow warriors attack Fort Newcomb, they leave no one alive -- except a beautiful woman trapped beneath a burning building. Rescued by Skye Fargo, she's soon taken hostage by the Crow raiders, who discover that the Trailsman isn't afraid to ruffle a few feathers to get her back.

From the Spur Award-winning author of Summer of Pearls When broken-hearted Honore Greenwood leaves New Orleans -- and the woman he loves -- to build a fort right in the heart of Comanche Country, he knows he has volunteered for a most dangerous project. With the Mexican War and the California Gold Rush bringing chaos across the plains, Honoree will have to work hard to earn the trust of the proud, powerful, and unpredictable Comanche people.

In 1866, the war in the West, with its bloody collision of cultures, is increasing in tension and danger. As the U.S. Army builds ever more forts on the Great Plains, Red Cloud, a Lakota Sioux war leader, assembles more than 3,000 warriors to drive out the white man.

Fleeing a shameful past, seventeen-year-old Ned Thorne joins the U.S. Army and, in 1871, is sent to the dangerous Arizona territories, where he joins his captain and a ragtag troop in the search for a missing woman supposedly kidnapped by the Apache.

Skye is born into a remote world of the unsettled West--her Scottish father a loving but moody mountain man, her mother a Lakota bride taken from her Sioux family by this passionate Highlander. But the steel-springed lunge of a mountain lion tears Skye's mother from her, starting her on a destiny-filled journey. With half-Scottish feet clad in Indian moccasins, Skye walks two separate paths, not knowing whether to believe her father's bitter enemy who calls her a half-breed, or Turtle Woman, her proud Lakota grandmother.

The reality of frontier life in Kansas becomes brutally clear to 12-year-old James Coady McIlvain when his father is scalped and he is taken prisoner by hostile Indians. Escaping with the aid of an Indian friend, Coady finds himself with a buffalo sharpshooter that he imagines is the embodiment of his hero, Buffalo Bill Cody, a role in which the circumspect Griffith feels himself totally inadequate.

At Bent's Fort on the Mexican frontier, the Skyes agree to help a mysterious Cheyenne woman, Standing Alone, locate her two children who were kidnapped by Ute Indians several years before and sold into bondage in Mexico. The mission, impossible, dangerous, and foolhardy to all Skye's friends, takes the three to Santa Fe and Taos and into a strange association with an eccentric, self-proclaimed Texas adventurer and filibuster, Colonel Childress, who agrees to help them for reasons no one can guess.

In the New World of the 16th century, the Elk-Dog band of "the People" are well-respected on the Great Plains for their horse and warrior skills. When the young men of "the People" want to wage war on their enemies, it is up to the chief to keep the peace among his own tribe.

Veteran, award-winning western writer Boggs follows the tricky crime-solving mission of Comanche tribal policeman Daniel Killstraight in his effort to forget the recent murder of a woman close to him. Needing to clear his mind, Killstraight decides to venture from the Indian Territory, where his law enforcement bona fides protect him, down to New Mexico Territory, where he has no jurisdiction. In the town of Deming, an Apache is being held for the murder of a teenage girl, and Killstraight succumbs to the pull of needing to learn for himself the actual details. So he travels there, ostensibly to prove the Indian suspect's innocence. Killstraight knows that a lynching party is also heading to Deming, betting that the Deming jail can be easily compromised, and the Apache extricated. Once in town, though, Killstraight realizes that the man behind bars is no Indian but a white man, and now Killstraight is bent on gathering a complete picture of this person to understand the true circumstances of the crime.

Comanche Indian captive Eli McCullough must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong -- a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.

The Civil War has ended, and Union soldiers and federal officials have taken control of Texas as Rusty Shannon rides to his home on the Colorado River. As a child he was a captive of the Comanche, as a young man a proud member of a ranging company protecting settlers from Indian raids. Shannon's fate is intertwined with the young man accompanying him: Andy Pickard, himself but recently rescued from Comanche captivity and known by his captors as Badger Boy. Texas is in turmoil, overrun with murderous outlaws, lawmen exacting penalties from suspected former Confederates, nightriders, and the ever-dangerous Comanche bands. In this tempestuous time and place, Rusty tries desperately to resume his prewar life. His friend Shanty, a freed slave, is burned out of his home by the Ku Klux Klan; his own homestead is confiscated by his special nemesis, the murderous Oldham brothers; and the son of a girl he once loved is kidnapped by Comanches.

Benton McCaleb and his band of bold-spirited cowboys traveled long and hard to drive thousands of ornery cattle into Wyoming's Sweetwater Valley. They're in the midst of setting up a ranch just north of Cheyenne when a ruthless railroad baron and his hired killers try to force them off the land. Now, with the help of the Shoshoni Indian tribe and a man named Buffalo Bill Cody, McCaleb and his men must vow to stand and fight. Outgunned and outmanned, they will wage the most ferocious battle of their lives--to win the right to call the land their own.

When Ned Giles is orphaned as a teenager, he heads West by joining the 1932 Great Apache Expedition on their search for the kidnapped son of a wealthy Mexican landowner, but Ned's growing feelings for an Apache girl soon force him to choose allegiances and make a fateful decision that will haunt him forever.

In this powerful, moving account of the last days of Crazy Horse, Terry C. Johnson weaves a saga of warriors, lovers, peacemakers, traitors, war, and suffering among the innocents on both sides. Most of all, this is the story of one man -- a mystic, a fighter, a father and husband -- whose last journey was as fateful and dramatic as a life lived without surrender.

"Lapwai Winter" is set in Northeastern Oregon in the time of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces. A treaty agreement with the Indians has been violated and the territorial rights of the Indians have been revoked. Narrated by Heyets, one of Joseph's family members, this gripping drama unfolds with the question of war clearly in the balance. "Winter Shadows" finds a band of Mandan Indians facing the hardest winter in their tribal history. An unscrupulous Assiniboin medicine man has taken advantage of them and their salvation may rest with an orphaned outcast.